gray concrete building
Picture of an archaeological site in which various people are digging.

As I was reading an article about the extinction of homo erectus, I realized that somebody is going to tell your story one day, long after you’re gone, and they may get it wrong.

A group of archaeologists at Australian National University who were researching the species, Homo erectus, concluded that the reason they became extinct is that they were lazy.

“They really don’t seem to have been pushing themselves,” said Dr. Ceri Shipton, lead researcher behind the new theory, in a press release. “I don’t get the sense they were explorers looking over the horizon. They didn’t have that same sense of wonder that we have.”

Retroactive snark. That’s a new one! Even if you asked Judge Judy for a ruling on Homo erectus, I’ll bet she’d take a pass. “Throw rocks at people from the stone age? Not me, pal.”

For a group of scientists, these folks seem awfully petty. But I suppose pettiness has been around since the dawn of time. In fact, even cavemen must have had to deal with critics. “That not how you make fire, Irv. Must put more oomph into it.”

The way the Homo erectus story was framed also varied, with some online outlets reporting it as fact, and others as conjecture. One conservative UK tabloid even ran the headline, “Homo erectus went extinct because they were lazy!” Yikes!

So, don’t wait for anyone else to tell the world who you are and what you stand for. Tell your own tale now, while you still can. Don’t wait until you’re a fossil in a field only to have some snarky archaeologist (snarkyologist?) talk smack about you. Tell it in living color, in gruesome detail, in pretty pictures, in mellifluous music, in your own way. Then, when you’re an ancient artifact, you’ll give that snarkyologist who finds you a lot to talk about.